How the Sequester Will Change How We Eat

Today marks the beginning of the budget maelstrom known as the Sequester, a vast round of federal funding cuts that was specifically designed to be so unthinkably horrible that, surely, Congress and the White House would come to a budget deal before it came to this. Whispered conversations and shouting matches are going on right now in a lot of back rooms in Washington, but things don't seem to be going so well. Which means that a huge number of federal programs are going to lose a lot of money, starting today. And a lot of federal programs are all about food.

Like, for instance, the USDA. That's right! In the time of worldwide horse meat scandal, the food safety organization that monitors our nation's meat supply is on the butcher block, which is likely to lead to rolling meat shortages around the country. Agriculture SecretaryTom Vilsack told Reuters that, no matter what, USDA inspectors will have to be put on furlough, meaning that a lot of slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants will have to shut down, since it's illegal to ship meat without the USDA stamp of approval (and a huge backlog of processed meat is not a good thing to have just sitting around).

To match the budget cuts, every single one of the USDA's 8,400 inspectors would have to take 15 business days of unpaid leave, which would end up costing the industry $10 billion in production, according to the White House. And before you cry "bias," for using the White House's numbers, Republican lawmakers don't disagree that the sequester is going to be brutal. But according to the New York Times, Speaker of the HouseJohn Boehner has declared himself finished with negotiation, and "House Republicans could not be more pleased with their leader." Both the Democrats and Republicans in the Senate tried to come up with some last-minute stopgaps to stop the sequester, but both efforts seemed designed to fail. The sequester is what's up.

With its budget in the balance, the USDA also announced today that it plans to approve a new horse slaughter plant in New Mexico, the first that could produce horsemeat suitable for human consumption in the U.S. since the industry was shut down in 2007. Their reasoning was that horses were already being shipped out of the country for processing in Canada and Mexico, so it would be better for consumers for the meat to be inspected by USDA employees. Employees who, thanks to the sequester, might not be able to actually inspect the new facility.

In the larger world of things we eat, the FDA announced yesterday that it, too, would have to make huge cuts under the sequester, to the tune of an estimated 2,100 fewer food safety inspectors on the beat this year. Given that we haven't had a stellar food safety record of late even with a full-strength FDA, this does not seem good.

Even worse, if the sequester goes into effect, 600,000 women, infants, and children would get cut from the federal Women, Infants, and Children Program that gives low-income pregnant women and children under 5 medically approved food assistance. And it's not just kids who'll get hurt: programs like Meals on Wheels might have to cut 4 million meals for seniors out of their budget. Some of the cutting is gradual, and the optimists out there hope that states will reshuffle their budgets to fill the gaps in programs like these, but only time will tell.

And looking to the future, the sequester's cuts on scientific research funding might have an unpredictable, long-term impact on the state of the American food economy, as agricultural science departments are forced to cut their research output. More significantly, the science sequester will likely cause university grad programs to shrink, cutting off the supply of future scientists to deal with the world's food problems down the line.